Complicity in American Literature after 1945: Liberalism, Race, and Colonialism

Complicity in American Literature after 1945 offers a literary and intellectual history of the idea of complicity in the United States, proposing a new frame for understanding American literature in the period. The term “complicity” derives etymologically from the Latin complicāre, which means “to fold.” If one is complicit, one is folded into a larger system of social harm over which one has little or no direct control. In the period from 1945 to the early 1970s, complicity with structural racism became a central concern for American writing and thought, as it grappled with the Holocaust, colonialism, the Vietnam War, and racial domination at home in the United States. Writers and thinkers grasped complicity both as a social phenomenon to be represented and as a problem threatening to enfold writing itself. In addressing complicity, intellectuals were obliged to reconsider their social role and to innovate means of literary expression capable of articulating new experiences of guilt and responsibility. Complicity in American Literature after 1945 tells the story of that process as it took place across several genres, from highbrow short stories to crime fiction, and from experimental metafiction to the reportage essays of the New Journalism. It argues that the history of racial complicity is inseparable from the history of liberalism, and shows how we can make sense of our present preoccupations with complicity by studying its origins in the past.